How do I translate an ISO 8601 datetime string into a Python datetime object?

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I'm getting a datetime string in a format like "2009-05-28T16:15:00" (this is ISO 8601, I believe). One hackish option seems to be to parse the string using time.strptime and passing the first six elements of the tuple into the datetime constructor, like:

datetime.datetime(*time.strptime("2007-03-04T21:08:12", "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S")[:6])

I haven't been able to find a "cleaner" way of doing this. Is there one?

iso8601 datetime-parsing datetime python
11 Answers

Since Python 3.7 and no external libraries, you can use the fromisoformat function from the datetime module:

datetime.datetime.fromisoformat('2019-01-04T16:41:24+0200')

Python 2 doesn't support the %z format specifier, so it's best to explicitly use Zulu time everywhere if possible:

datetime.datetime.strptime("2007-03-04T21:08:12Z", "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ")
Bluebird75_136180
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